new york city Archives ⋆ Brett Ryback

PASSING THROUGH to Premiere at Goodspeed

Goodspeed Musicals announced last night that Passing Through will receive its world premiere at their Norma Terris Theatre in July 2019. According to their press release, the show was “the inspiring hit musical of Goodspeed’s 2018 Festival of New Musicals.”

It was also developed over the course of two winters by Goodspeed’s Johnny Mercer’s Writers Colony. It’s a homegrown musical that my collaborator Eric Ulloa and I are very excited to see premiere at the company that helped bring it to life.

Set amidst the rich sounds and diverse tapestry of the American landscape, Passing Through tells the incredible true story of a young man who journeys on foot from Pennsylvania to California, collecting stories as he goes. But when his trek brings to light an unresolved family crisis, he must use the lessons he’s gathered to finally confront his past. It’s a brand new American musical about the healing power of fellowship and forgiveness.

Read more about Goodspeed’s 2019 Season here.

Two Songs, Two Cities

NYC on Monday and LA on Tuesday!

Whichever coast you’re on, you have a chance to catch some songs from my show Joe Schmoe Saves the World.

The Most Underutilized Resource in Theater

Rajiv Joseph is one of my favorite contemporary playwrights. I remember seeing his play A Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo in Los Angeles and being blown away. It was political, yet personal. Surreal, yet plainspoken. It captured a place and a wonderment that I seek to find in my own writing.

In this Broadway.com interview on the occasion of his latest play Guards at the Taj, he describes a lesson he learned about collaboration: Continue reading The Most Underutilized Resource in Theater

Memorial

An excerpt from my journal upon visiting the 9/11 Memorial, July 26, 2013.

The sense here is one of absence.

Each inverted fountain a pit, reflecting for me the pit I feel in my stomach. A stillness as the water floats silently toward an abrupt fall. The thin threads of water evoking tears, C said, or for me bodies falling. And in the center, an inevitable drift towards a hole with no bottom that can be seen.

The names in bronze surrounding the pools – so many that you feel a sense of remembrance and anonymity – also reflect an absence. The letters are carved out; there, but not there – like the people it seeks to memorialize.

The ongoing construction around the site is a constant reminder of New York City. Lovely, bittersweet, inescapable.

We sat against a temporary barrier to read the map and were abruptly shooed away by a dispassionate security guard. An oddly irreverent move, I thought. “What if we’d been crying there?” I asked C. The brusque tone of the guard was out of place in with the solemnity and awe. We hadn’t been doing anything inappropriate. “The only inappropriate thing is disrespect,” I said.

I’m reminded of Alan Bennett. In History Boys, when Hector muses about school groups at Auschwitz: “Where do they eat their lunches? Do they take pictures? Are they smiling? Nothing is appropriate.”

Children, too young to know anything about what is being remembered, run about the grounds laughing, yelling, playing with the water and the stones surrounding the trees. A natural order, I thought. It’s good that we remember the pain and the sorrow, but it’s also good that there will be those after us who won’t have to.

I look up to see yet another absence. The sky is bright and cloudless, and there is so much of it. An odd sight in New York, especially in this part of the city. The abundance of clear blue sky is its own silent reminder of what once was there, but is no more.

Getting Away with Murder

I’m so freakin excited to share this with you guys.

This summer, I will be heading to New York City to make my Off-Broadway debut in Second Stage’s production of Murder for Two by Joe Kinosian and Kellen Blair.

Mixing classic musical comedy with a dash of Agatha Christie, everyone is a suspect in this house of eccentric characters unfazed by the dead body on the floor. But this whodunit comes with a killer twist: one actor investigates the crime, the other plays all thirteen suspects, and they both play the piano! This madcap mystery will tickle the ivories and your funny bone.

I will be playing the young investigator, and musical theatre/Broadway mainstay Jeff Blumenkrantz will play…everyone else.

If you don’t know, Jeff is an established songwriter as well as a Broadway actor. One of his most famous pieces is “I Won’t Mind”, recorded by Audra McDonald. Which begs the question…between Jeff, Joe, Kellen, and myself – how many songwriters does it take to mount a two-person show in New York City? (Also – whoever at broadwayworld.com put Jeff and I shoulder-to-shoulder in that picture is a freaking genius. Can anyone say Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen solving a murder on the UWS?)

The production will be directed by Scott Schwartz (which adds another songwriter to the mix if you count his father Stephen) and is scheduled to run from July 10 – August 10th. So DO NOT miss this NYC. I mean YOU.

For tickets and more info click here.